History The Best Quotes About History And Historians

List Rules Must be a famous or well-known quote. Vote for the History and historians sayings that strongly resonate with you, and downvote any you didn't like.

A list of the best history and historians quotes and sayings, including the names of each speaker or author when available. This list is sorted by popularity, so only the most famous history and historians quotes are at the top. The authors of these historic history and historians quotes are displayed next to each quote, so if you see one you like be sure to check out other inspirational history and historians quotes from that same writer.

This list answers the questions, "What are the best quotes about history and historians?" and "What are inspirational history and historians quotes?"

This list includes notable history and historians quotes by various authors, writers, playwrights, speakers, politicians, athletes, poets, and more. Vote on your favorites so that the greatest history and historians quotes rise to the top, as the order of the list changes dynamically based on votes. Don't let your favorite history and historians sayings get to the bottom of the list.

list ordered by

1

117 43

The causes of events are ever more interesting than the events themselves.Cicero

2

101 38

A generation which ignores history has no past and no future.Robert A. Heinlein

3

52 17

To believe what has not occurred in history will not occur at all, is to argue disbelief in the dignity of man.Mahatma Gandhi

4

49 15

One of the lessons of history is that nothing is often a good thing to do and always a clever thing to say.Will Durant

5

43 14

There is a history in all men's lives.William Shakespeare

6

38 15

History repeats itself. That's one of the things wrong with history.Clarence Darrow

7

28 9

History is strewn thick with evidence that a truth is not hard to kill, but a lie, well told, is immortal.Mark Twain

8

40 19

Never forget the importance of history. To know nothing of what happened before you took your place on earth, is to remain a child for ever and ever.

9

31 14

The first duty of an historian is to be on guard against his own sympathies.James Anthony Froude

10

25 10

Fable is more historical than fact, because fact tells us about one man and fable tells us about a million men.G. K. Chesterton

11

16 5

To be ignorant of the lives of the most celebrated men of antiquity is to continue in a state of childhood all our days.Plutarch

12

13 3

We should not look back unless it is to derive useful lessons from past errors, and for the purpose of profiting by dearly bought experience.George Washington

13

20 10

Every time history repeats itself the price goes up.

14

14 5

For my part, I consider that it will be found much better by all parties to leave the past to history, especially as I propose to write that history myself.Winston Churchill

15

10 2

The game of history is usually played by the best and the worst over the heads of the majority in the middle.Eric Hoffer

16

11 3

It is the true office of history to represent the events themselves, together with the counsels, and to leave the observations and conclusions thereupon to the liberty and faculty of every man's judgment.Francis Bacon

17

12 4

18

12 4

History is one of the most remarkable things in our lives. The mere fact it occurred makes it remarkable.

19

13 5

The historian must have some conception of how men who are not historians behave. Otherwise he will move in a world of the dead. He can only gain that conception through personal experience, and he can only use his personal experiences when he is a genius.E. M. Forster

20

14 6

Fellow citizens, we cannot escape history.Abraham Lincoln

21

20 13

History is but a confused heap of facts.

22

13 7

The pyramids, attached with age, have forgotten the names of their founders.Buckminster Fuller

23

6 1

The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.Karl Marx

24

15 10

More than any time in history mankind faces a crossroads. One path leads to despair and utter hopelessness, the other to total extinction. Let us pray that we have the wisdom to choose correctly.Woody Allen

25

10 5

The history of the world is but the biography of great men.Thomas Carlyle

26

13 8

God cannot alter the past, but historians can.

27

8 4

Study men, not historians.Harry S. Truman

28

8 4

Historian. A broad -- gauge gossip.Ambrose Bierce

29

8 4

30

7 3

Historians desiring to write the actions of men, ought to set down the simple truth, and not say anything for love or hatred; also to choose such an opportunity for writing as it may be lawful to think what they will, and write what they think, which is a rare happiness of the time.Walter Raleigh

31

6 2

You treat world history as a mathematician does mathematics, in which nothing but laws and formulas exist, no reality, no good and evil, no time, no yesterday, no tomorrow, nothing but an eternal, shallow, mathematical present.Hermann Hesse

32

3 0

Few will have the greatness to bend history itself; but each of us can work to change a small portion of events, and in the total; of all those acts will be written the history of this generation.Robert F. Kennedy

33

10 9

Not to know what has been transacted in former times is to be always a child. If no use is made of the labors of past ages, the world must remain always in the infancy of knowledge.Cicero

34

10 9

Anybody can make history. Only a great man can write it.Oscar Wilde

35

8 7

The whole past is the procession of the present.Thomas Carlyle

36

6 5

The main thing is to make history, not to write it.Otto von Bismarck

37

5 4

History is always written wrong, and so always needs to be rewritten.George Santayana

38

4 3

Human history in essence is the history of ideas.H. G. Wells

39

4 3

The history of mankind is his character.Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

40

4 3

And having wisdom with each studious year, in meditation dwelt, with learning wrought, and shaped his weapon with an edge severe, sapping a solemn creed with solemn sneer.George Gordon Noel Byron, 6th Baron Byron

41

15 15

History is more or less bunk.Henry Ford

42

2 1

Agam Levi added Time after time, history ran over the luddites and romanticists, those who sought to restore the old and delay the new. And every time, history did it with faster, more reliable and more advanced vehicles.

43

9 9

History books that contain no lies are extremely dull.Anatole France

44

7 7

Our best history is still poetry.Ralph Waldo Emerson

45

6 6

From the heights of these pyramids, forty centuries look down on us.Napoleon Bonaparte

46

6 6

An account, mostly false, of events, mostly unimportant, which are brought about by rulers, mostly knaves, and soldiers, mostly fools.Ambrose Bierce

47

4 4

To give an accurate and exhaustive account of that period would need a far less brilliant pen than mine.Max Beerbohm

48

4 4

History is the distillation of rumor.Thomas Carlyle

49

4 4

People will not look forward to posterity who will not look backward to their ancestors.Edmund Burke

50

4 4

History is nothing but a pack of tricks that we play upon the dead.Voltaire

not on the list? add item #71

List Rules: Must be a famous or well-known quote. Vote for the History and historians sayings that strongly resonate with you, and downvote any you didn't like.